The end game for mass purchased idol CDs: Proselytizing? Garbage? Recycling?

This is a translation of this post from Money Post, a personal finance news website. It was originally posted on November 6, 2017 in the wake of a national news story from October 17, 2017 where hundreds of CDs from idol group AKB48 were found dumped in the woods down in Fukuoka province. I'm translating this now because I think new fans of Asian pop music don't understand that to your average person in countries like Japan or Korea, bulk purchasing CDs is not normal behavior. Idol music (including what we call "K-pop") is a subculture. The songs sometimes cross to the mainstream but in reality the reason that the end of the year singles chart in Japan is full of AKB-family groups are men like the ones in the article below, not a general mainstream popularity. As I've tried to explain many, many times physical CD sales in 2020--even in a country like Japan--are not a good metric to measure things like mainstream popularity.

I've certainly bought extra copies of CDs before for the goodies--usually in my case it's a poster or something like that because I live overseas and cannot fly across the world for a handshake event--but I have friends who participate in idol events like the ones detailed below and I've had friends pass me their extra CDs (also as detailed below). But these business practices are exploitative and can be very damaging for fans who lean towards obsessive behavior. I would strongly urge any fan who catches themselves thinking about spending money buying numerous copies of the same CDs or the same digital song file to stop and think. Why are you doing this? What do you get out of it? Will those 10-20 CDs simply end up in the garbage? Will that chart position you spent your graduation gift card buying the same song over and over again to help get really make you happy?

As always, this translation is intended for personal entertainment purposes only.

In October, 585 CDs from the group AKB48 were dumped in the mountains near the city of Dazaifu in Fukuoka Prefecture. A man in his thirties living in the city, an office worker, was arrested as the suspect in this violation of the waste management law. He’d bought the CDs with the aim of collecting ballots for AKB48’s “Senbatsu General Election” and disposal had become a problem, so he’d thrown them away, he said.

Because of the rise of extras like handshake event tickets and election ballots, there are now many idol fans who mass purchase numerous copies of the same CD. This is what Mr. K, an idol fan in his 30s, has to say.

“Recently in the idol world, people who buy CDs can get more perks than just handshake events. There’s all sorts of things like selfie events, signing events, and mini-lives. You need different numbers of CDs to participate in these kinds of events. For example, for a handshake event it’s one CD, mini-live is one CD, selfie event is two CDs, to get all the members for a selfie event it’s five CDs… you get the idea. To participate in everything, you buy mass quantities of the same CD.

So, in the case of the handshake events, one CD will only get you about 10 seconds. But if you buy lots of copies and get all the tickets to use at once, you can extend the time for the handshake. For example, to talk to a member for ten minutes, you could use 50 handshake tickets at the same time. Because idol fans enjoy participating in these events like this, the result is fans are left with have mass quantities of CDs."

For idol fans, purchasing mass quantities of the same CD is no longer rare but this article is curious about the end game for those CDs. Because some people who illegally dump CDs when faced with the problem of disposal have been revealed we can assume there must be many more cases we haven’t seen directly. This is what A, a freelancer who is familiar with the idol world, has to say.

“If this was the old days, it was standard practice to sell CDs you didn’t want to the used CD store but in the case of these idol CDs that use the business practice of including perks, there’s a lot of stock the shops are unable to buy. For example, take Book Off [a chain of secondhand book/CD/etc stores - FG] they can't buy more than two copies of the same CD. So, what happens is that there’s a huge quantity of AKB48 CDs and so on that make the rounds of secondhand goods stores and don't fetch a great price, most stores aren’t going to accept an unlimited number of CDs that they can’t sell.”

Giving away CDs as proselytizing

If you can’t sell to a secondhand store, what can you do? The previously mentioned idol fan Mr. K has this to say.

“You can call it “proselytizing”, giving away copies to friends or coworkers. There's a feeling like if you hand the CDs over they’ll be interested, even if it's just a little. I was especially proactive about handing them over to people with kids. However, it’s just in the beginning that you get joy from passing out CDs. You get to a point where you’ve given people who have no interest in idols one, two CDs and it’s just too much. After that, you can’t give anything away. Because you can’t force people to take the CDs you don’t need, recently, I haven’t tried to give anything to anybody who didn’t want it.”

You can’t give them away to friends or coworkers anymore but on the other hand there are many idol fans who will accept them.

“You can take excess CDs to events where multiple idol groups will appear and it’s like ‘Please take one’, and pass them out like that. In the middle of the enthusiastic fans in front of the venue, there’ll be people passing out CDs worth 3000 yen [~US $30] like they were packets of tissues. [Tissues are used in Japan as a promotional item like fliers; people stand in front of train stations with baskets of tissues that have a slogan or something on them and pass them out. -FG] Because many idol fans do want to take them, you can dispose of them very efficiently.” (Mr. K)

“If you throw away 200 CDs, they won’t be picked up [by the trash collectors].”

There are also people who throw away large numbers of CDs they’ve purchased. Mr. T, an idol fan in his 40s, prefaced this revelation by saying, “I understand this isn’t something to be proud of but…”

“In my case, after removing the handshake tickets or ballots, I throw all the CDs away. In my area, paper and plastic are all burnable garbage, I can put the entire CD package into the trashcan and on burnable garbage days I put it out to be collected. However, previously there was a time when I was throwing out about 200 CDs at once and they weren’t picked up. Was it because when there’s too many it’s irregular trash? Possibly that’s what seemed to have happened. That’s why now I throw them away bit by bit, never more than 50 CDs at once.”

However, for the plastic cases of CDs, there are times that recyclers will take them. Mr. T continues.

“If you take the lyrics booklets and back jackets out of the CD cases, you can recycle them. I have fan friends in real life who searched for recycling shops on the internet and brought their CD cases in. The recycling shops won’t take the CDs themselves, a lot of times the CDs will just get thrown away like that.”

We could say that in reality for the many mass purchased idol CDs there is still no meaningful recycling method.

Originally posted July 4, 2020